Page 327 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 14 What Is the Research Base That Informs Powerful Social Studies Teaching? 299
Once students begin working on activities or assignments, teachers should circulate to monitor their progress and provide assistance if necessary. Assuming that students have a general understanding of what to do and how to do it, these interventions can be kept brief and confined to minimal and indirect forms of help. If teacher assistance is too direct or extensive, teachers will end up doing tasks for students instead of helping them learn to do the tasks themselves.
Teachers also need to assess performance for completion and accuracy. When perfor- mance is poor, they will need to teach the content again and provide follow-up assign- ments designed to ensure that content is understood and skills are mastered.
Most tasks will not have their full effects unless they are followed by reflection or debriefing activities in which the teacher reviews the task with the students, provides general feedback about performance, and reinforces main ideas as they relate to overall goals. Reflection activities should also include opportunities for students to ask follow-up questions, share task-related observations or experiences, compare opinions, or in other ways deepen their appreciation of what they have learned and how it relates to their lives outside of school.
9. Strategy Teaching The teacher models and instructs students in learning and self- regulation strategies.
Research findings. General learning and study skills as well as domain-specific skills (such as constructing meaning from text, solving mathematical problems, or reasoning scientifically) are most likely to be learned thoroughly and become accessible for applica- tion if they are taught as strategies to be brought to bear purposefully and implemented with metacognitive awareness and self-regulation. This requires comprehensive instruc- tion that includes attention to propositional knowledge (what to do), procedural knowl- edge (how to do it), and conditional knowledge (when and why to do it). Strategy teaching is especially important for less able students who otherwise might not come to understand the value of consciously monitoring, self-regulating, and reflecting upon their learning processes (Meichenbaum & Biemiller, 1998; Pressley & Beard El-Dinary, 1993; Weinstein & Mayer, 1986).
In the classroom. Many students do not develop effective learning and problem- solving strategies on their own but can acquire them through modeling and explicit instruction from their teachers. Poor readers, for example, can be taught reading comprehension strategies such as keeping the purpose of an assignment in mind when reading, activating relevant background knowledge, identifying major points in attending to the outline and flow of content, monitoring understanding by generating and trying to answer questions about the content, or drawing and testing inferences by making inter- pretations, predictions, and conclusions. Instruction should include not only demonstra- tions of and opportunities to apply the skill itself but also explanations of the purpose of the skill (i.e., what it does for the learner) and the occasions in which it would be used.
Strategy teaching is likely to be most effective when it includes cognitive modeling: The teacher thinks out loud while modeling use of the strategy. This makes overt for learners the otherwise covert thought processes that guide use of the strategy in a variety of contexts. Cognitive modeling provides learners with first-person language (“self talk”) that they can adapt directly when using the strategy themselves. This eliminates the need for translation that is created when instruction is presented in the impersonal third- person language of explanation or even the second-person language of coaching.
In addition to strategies for use in particular domains or types of assignments, tea- chers can model and instruct their students in general study skills and learning strategies such as rehearsal (repeating material to remember it more effectively), elaboration (put- ting material into one’s own words and relating it to prior knowledge), organization
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